Fifty years later, Rome closes once again the door that John Paul II had to reopen

In October 1976, Cardinal Jean Villot, Secretary of State, replied on behalf of Paul VI to Annibale Bugnini, who had written from Tehran, where the architect of the liturgical reform was serving as nuncio. Bugnini proposed reauthorizing the 1962 Mass under certain conditions to defuse the conflict with Archbishop Lefebvre. The response was that “it does not seem opportune to grant now what has been denied in the past,” so as not to aggravate confusion or undermine the credibility of the Holy See. Fifty years later, Cardinal Arthur Roche, Prefect of Divine Worship, assured AdVaticanum that Leo XIV will not change Traditionis custodes nor return to Summorum Pontificum. This summer, the Secretariat of State had already denied the Basilica of St. Peter to the Mass of the Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage, which in 2025 was indeed celebrated there. Neither Villot’s reply nor Roche’s addresses the Mass itself. Both defend a decision. Yves Chiron published his biography of Bugnini in France in 2016, and the Spanish edition by Homo Legens adds not a single line about the present. It needs none: anyone who finishes it has the impression of having read, under different names, the chronicle of the last five years.

The opposition to Bugnini came from the Curia

The first thing the book disproves is that resistance to the reform came from the margins. Ferdinando Antonelli, Bugnini’s collaborator since 1948 and later a cardinal, wrote that his most notable shortcoming was his lack of formation and theological sense in a matter where every gesture conveys an idea. At the 1967 Synod, the Secretary of State, Amleto Cicognani, called for an end to the changes so as not to confuse the faithful. In 1969, Benno Gut, the first Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, admitted that the limits of the conciliar constitution had been exceeded and that the Pope had often yielded, against his will, to initiatives taken without authorization. Cardinal Siri summed up the dilemma: the Council had not asked for such a revolution, but, once the law was approved, the only option was to obey. They were not Lefebvrites. They were the Secretary of State, the Prefect of Divine Worship, and the Archbishop of Genoa.

A reform that went beyond the Council

Chiron does not speak of betrayal, but of heterotelia, the term used by sociologist Jules Monnerot for an action that pursues one end and reaches another: the reform went beyond not what the Council desired, but what it had foreseen. The method explains the discrepancy. According to Chiron, the Consilium functioned as an autonomous decision-making body that answered only to the Pope. Concelebration was extended with more than nine hundred indults before its rite even existed; the Mass facing the people was imposed without Sacrosanctum Concilium mentioning it; and Communion in the hand moved from concession to norm. Practice went ahead, and the law followed later.

The consultations served the same function they do today. In October 1967, Bugnini celebrated the so-called normative Mass before the Synod. Only 71 fathers approved its structure without reservations; 43 voted against it, and 62 requested changes, which Bugnini himself later described, in a way, as a vote against the Consilium. The project was redone, and the reform continued on its course. Shortly afterward, when Latin-rite bishops were asked about Communion in the hand, 1,233 said no and fewer than six hundred said yes; the instruction Memoriale Domini maintained the norm and opened the exceptions that are now the rule. In 2020, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith consulted the bishops on Summorum Pontificum. According to the report journalist Diane Montagna made public in 2025, the final assessment, dated February 2021, concluded that the majority of the bishops who responded believed that changing the law would do more harm than good. Five months later, Francis invoked that consultation to abrogate it. The Holy See did not deny the document; it spoke of a partial reconstruction. In October, asked about the data, Roche replied that he has no doubt and that he hears the same from the bishops.

The argument of authority

Then, as now, the response to objections was one of authority rather than liturgy. In November 1969, Paul VI gave obedience to the Council as the first reason for the change. At the consistory of May 1976, he specified that the new ordinary had been promulgated to replace the old one, that its use was not left to the discretion of priests or faithful, and that the previous Missal was permitted only to elderly or sick priests celebrating without a congregation. Traditionis custodes says the same with different syntax: the books of Paul VI and John Paul II are “the only expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite.” Roche has closed the syllogism: the Council is the Church’s highest legislative authority, and whoever rejects or resists it “distances himself from the center of Catholicism.” It is the old equation according to which the reformed Mass is the Council, and to question it is to leave the Church, and it is precisely the one Chiron’s book undermines by measuring the distance between what the Council foresaw and what emerged from the Consilium.

The vocabulary of the reproaches changes, but not their function. In 1965, Cardinal Lercaro, president of the Consilium, attributed the resistance to ignorance, to a myopic tradition, and to routine. In October, liturgist Andrea Grillo accused the Archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, of using “schismatic arguments” for maintaining that the Church was more united under Summorum Pontificum. The auxiliary bishop of ’s-Hertogenbosch, Rob Mutsaerts, has asked the question no one in Rome answers: why every ancient liturgy is a treasure except the Roman one.

From the 1984 indult to Traditionis custodes

The instrument has not changed either. In July 1971, The Times published a petition in favor of the old Mass signed, among others, by Agatha Christie, Graham Greene, and Jorge Luis Borges. Paul VI granted England and Wales an indult for groups and special occasions, provided it was not a sign or cause of division, and refused to extend it to any other episcopal conference. In July 2024, the same newspaper published another, with signatures such as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s, invoking the one from 1971. The formula Bugnini proposed in 1976 required Lefebvre to declare that the new Mass was neither heretical nor Protestant and foresaw the 1962 ordinary with the new lectionary in the vernacular, fixed churches and schedules or determined groups, and episcopal oversight. Paul VI rejected it. Eight years later, John Paul II’s indult, Quattuor abhinc annos, adopted a very similar scheme: a public declaration of not questioning the legitimacy of the 1970 Missal, churches designated by the bishop and not parochial except in extraordinary cases, and days fixed by him.

Traditionis custodes reproduces that architecture. The bishop verifies that the groups do not exclude the validity and legitimacy of the reform, designates places that are not parish churches, sets the days, and orders that the readings be proclaimed in the vernacular. And it adds locks that not even Bugnini had foreseen: no new groups, and priests ordained after 2021 depend on an authorization that since 2023 has been reserved to Rome. The scaffolding is the same; the meaning, the opposite. In 1984 the indult was a door that was left ajar. In 2021 it is a waiting room, and Francis’s letter does not hide it: it speaks of the time these faithful need “to return to the Roman Rite promulgated by Saints Paul VI and John Paul II.”

Lefebvre, Écône, and the shadow of schism

There is a more uncomfortable parallel. On July 21, 1976, the eve of Lefebvre’s suspension a divinis, Bugnini wrote to Villot that a rupture had to be avoided. He was not heeded. Thirty-one years later, Benedict XVI wrote in the letter accompanying Summorum Pontificum that, in the critical moments when divisions are born, not enough had been done for reconciliation. Roche maintains today that that motu proprio was conceived to facilitate the return of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X. On July 1, 2026, Écône again consecrated bishops without a pontifical mandate, and the following day the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith declared the six bishops who took part excommunicated. Whatever the judgment on those consecrations, the old Mass is once again associated with schism, as in 1976.

Reality does the same as then: it takes no notice. The congregation’s 2021 assessment noted that young people were approaching the ancient form and that vocations in its communities were growing. The Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter has 602 members, 410 of them priests, an average age of 39, and 25 priestly ordinations this year, the highest figure in the series it has published since 2015. Paul VI had the honesty in 1969 to recognize that something of incalculable value was being renounced. Roche illustrates the Mass of his childhood with the priest’s instruction to him as an altar server—fifteen minutes from amice to amice—and asks those who complain that the Pope has not been kind to them what more they want.

Leo XIV closed in August his cycle of catecheses on Sacrosanctum Concilium by quoting Montini and situating the reform “in the furrow of the living tradition of the Church.” It is the thesis of continuity, the same one Paul VI upheld in 1969 when he assured that, if one looked carefully, the Mass had preserved its traditional line. Chiron dwells on the caution: whoever asks to look carefully admits that continuity is not immediately obvious. And the thesis has a consequence that Rome continues not to draw: if the reform prolongs tradition, the Mass that preceded it cannot be a danger. Benedict XVI left it written: “What for previous generations was sacred also remains sacred for us.” Ten years earlier, Ratzinger had written that the prohibition of the old Missal had no precedent in the history of the liturgy.

What was discussed in 1976 and what is discussed now is not an aesthetic or a nostalgia, but the form in which the Latin Church for centuries offered the sacrifice of Christ. Chiron recalls that the door Paul VI closed was reopened by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Villot invoked the credibility of the Holy See to keep it shut. Credibility did not suffer when it was reopened. It suffers every time one has to explain why it was closed.

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